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May 16, 2013

(++++) FAMILY MATTERS

Someone Could Get Hurt: A Memoir
of Twenty-First-Century Parenthood. By Drew Magary. Gotham Books. $25.

Learning to Listen: A Life Caring
for Children. By T. Berry Brazelton, M.D. Da Capo. $24.99.

Read the title of this article
two ways. The second word could be a plural noun; hence “family issues.” Or it
could be a verb; hence “family is important.” And thus it helps to read these
two books in very different ways as well. Both are first-person, experiential
works, but Drew Magary’s is designed primarily descriptively and with a great
deal of humor, while T. Berry Brazelton’s is far more prescriptive and serious.

Magary writes in a punchy,
tell-it-all style that never varies, whether he is making notes about drunk
driving and a child urinating in a hot tub or discussing a life-or-death
situation in a hospital. Magary thinks four-letter words are cool, and he uses
them incessantly. So one has to admire the comparatively mild bonding-with-his-daughter
scene in which the two exchange “butt” jokes at bath time rather than ones
using stronger language. In fact, his agreeing to stop those jokes – at his
wife’s insistence – shows more maturity, even if unwillingly, than most of the
rest of what he writes about. Magary overdoes pretty much everything: when his
wife is sound asleep, he says, “She was down like a gunshot victim” – just one
of many tasteless and inappropriate remarks in Someone Could Get Hurt. Yet the book is often a pleasure to read,
if only because Magary seems so clueless about just how clueless he is, or was.
“You’re supposed to leave a baby in a crib alone, with no other accoutrements
around, because it can roll into things like pillows and suffocate. If I
propped her up on a pillow, she might die. Then again, I was very, very tired.
I propped her up on a pillow.” Magary is very much into pop culture – in fact,
most of his writing is for publications and Web sites that promote pop culture
as if it means something – so he is given to such comments as, “All the little
girls grabbed at the dresses like [sic] it was the first night of eliminations
on The Bachelor, and my daughter
followed suit.” He also has a kneejerk anti-corporate bias, except of course
when he desperately needs something made by a corporation, and he often manages
to combine tastelessness with a rant within a page or so, as when there is a
possible issue of flat head syndrome involving his son: “I kept running my
hands along the boy’s head, checking for imperfections as if I were a Third
Reich phrenologist. …When your child is in danger of having a flat head, you
quickly learn that the money-grubbing executives at Big Helmet have gone to
great lengths to make baby helmets seem like a normal, even fashionable thing.”
But then, as if accidentally slipping into sensitivity, he actually comes up
with an occasional touch of insight: “We live in an age of remarkable
sensitivity, where other parents go to great lengths to appear tolerant and
accepting of ALL children, not merely their own. But deep down, we’re just as
judgmental and catty a species as we were decades ago. The patina of niceness
almost makes it worse.” This nearly inadvertent thoughtfulness is displayed to
its greatest and most affecting extent at the end of the book, when Magary’s
third child is born and is at risk of dying – and is placed in the hospital’s
Neonatal Intensive Care Unit. This chapter, which immediately follows one
filled with slapstick about making a “masterpizza” at home, finally shows that Magary
is a real human being who is not always putting on a “how cool I am” act. “I
cried and I could see the tears dripping down onto the plastic [of the
isolette], obscuring my view. That’s all you can do when your baby is in the
NICU. You cry and you cry and you don’t stop crying until the child is finally
home. …I knew he had to be in the NICU for a long time – weeks, months, perhaps
even half a year. He would die otherwise. Still, I wanted him out of this
horrible place. If I could just get him home to his crib, to his mother and
brother and sister, then everything would be fine. I knew it.” Magary’s honesty
here, which keeps reemerging even when he dons his “coolness” again in his
dealings with the doctors and nurses, makes up for a very great deal of the
superficiality in which he wallows elsewhere. The result is that Someone Could Get Hurt becomes, at the
end, a real, affecting and memorable narrative that overcomes much of the
snarkiness of earlier chapters by showing that even in the 21st
century, real families with real emotions and real crises – and real love –
find ways to bond and grow together.

If Magary is hyperkinetic,
Brazelton is sober, even staid. Readers of Brazelton’s previous books will be
somewhat taken aback by Learning to
Listen, because it is not a book giving advice about children, except indirectly.
It is, instead, an autobiography, and a suitably modest and outwardly focused
one, at that. Brazelton’s plainspoken style is as much a part of this book as
it is of all his others, starting on the very first page when he talks about
the “three distinct social classes” in Waco, Texas, when he was born there in
1918: “White people owned and ran everything. Black people did all of the
domestic work, and Mexican Americans did the rest.” Most of the book is about
the child-related discoveries that Brazelton has made throughout his life,
largely by keeping his eyes and ears open and by not getting locked into
traditional ways of thinking. To the extent that personal pride is expressed in
Learning to Listen, it comes in
Brazelton’s repeated comments on the ways in which he was an outsider: a
subhead in one chapter called “Troublemaking in the Delivery Room,” for
example, and an entire chapter called “Bucking the System.”Brazelton comes across as a knowledge sponge,
learning everywhere he goes and from everything he sees. A fascinating chapter
called “Listening to Other Cultures,” for instance, includes a dramatic scene
highlighting a difficult birth among Mayans in southern Mexico – in which
Brazelton’s recommendations were not effective, but the actions of a native
midwife were. Rather than bemoan the situation as primitive and risk-filled,
which it certainly was, Brazelton modestly remarks on his own failure and the
midwife’s success: “It seemed a miracle of psychosomatic medicine and of the
role of belief in their culture. My suggestions had no effect. It was another
lesson in respecting different cultural beliefs and practices.” Yet Brazelton
is no wide-eyed innocent about this – he is a very keen observer. In the same
section, for example, he discusses counting the number of breast feedings of
babies he observed in southern Mexico – 80 to 90 a day. “In the United States,
mothers generally wait until the baby’s crying activity rouses him thoroughly.
Then, she feeds him – reinforcing him for his own active participation. The
goal of the Mayan mother was that of having a quiet, docile baby. She was
protecting his low motor activity and high degree of sensitivity to stimuli
from the first. These goals are completely different.” This is fascinating
material, if not as directly instructive as readers have come to expect
Brazelton’s books to be. Yet there is a great deal of useful information in Learning to Listen, as Brazelton
describes the evolution in the 1970s of his famous Touchpoints “map of
behavioral and emotional development” and explains that the map “is designed to
reassure parents that regressions lead to predictable spurts in development and
that they can navigate them with the resources they can find within themselves,
their communities, and their cultures.”Brazelton’s
stories of his experiences outside the United States – not only in Mexico but
also in Caracas, New Delhi, South Africa, Sydney, Hong Kong and elsewhere – show
that his Touchpoints and other discoveries and approaches are not unique to one
country or culture but have applicability worldwide. By the end of Learning to Listen, readers will realize
that there are two equally valid ways to read the book’s subtitle: A Life Caring for Children as in “a life
taking care of children” and, equally correctly, as in “a life caring about children.” The two ways together
sum up a great deal of what is special about T. Berry Brazelton.